Original Gossip Girl Liz Smith New York Newsday Commercial Flashback

OGG: Original Gossip Girl Liz Smith in an ad for her then paper New York Newsday

My production company BigCitypix has spent a little time with NYC's hottest Gossip Girls of late, but we also had occasion a number of years back to go OGG: Original Gossip Girl. New York Magazine backs us up on that girl being the now 86-year-old Liz Smith who was recently dropped by the New York Post and delivered her last column on February 26. True to form for a Gossip Girl of any age she went directly on to trash her former employer in an interview over at The Daily Beast.

Clearly working for newspapers is bitch-worthy, so if you think getting dumped is bad, perhaps worse is being still on good employer-employee terms, so much so, that you are obligated to do television commercials that you have neither the desire nor any skill to do. You show up to a studio in NYC's Hell's Kitchen, sit at a DIY "restaurant" table constructed from plywood propped up on apple boxes to deliver your lines woodenly to the 24-year-old Production Assistant/Featured Extra seated mutely across from you. The impetus is by way of celebrating the introduction of "a fab new tab." Oh, but not "tab" as in "tabloid," get it? It's actually a physical tab sticking out from the newspaper. "You simply pull it..." This as 1990s internet tech was coming to a steady boil. Adds a bit more context to the news concerning newspapers of late.

To say the least, if memory serves, Ms. Smith was none to pleased with the experience. Wait, as we recall, there did seem to be a particular upside for Ms. Smith in her spending a few hours seated across from the nice young, peach-of-a-girl, Production Assistant/Featured Extra... Perhaps you might even find a glimmer in the doyenne's eye when you watch for yourself above.

via BigCityPix